1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer systems and more particularly to computer network communications such as electronic mail and a system and method for transmitting and browsing preformatted information on computer networks. The invention is more particularly related to applying these methods and systems to Internet electronic mail and a multimedia browser.
2. Discussion of the Background
Recently, and more particularly in the last two years, growth in the use of the Internet has been explosive. Much of the recent growth is attributable to the popularity of the World Wide Web (WWW), originally developed between 1989 and 1991 by CERN, the European Particle Physics Institute on Geneva, Switzerland, and the more recent development of a software program called "Mosaic." Mosaic is a multimedia, hypertext linked browser for the Internet. Most of the multimedia communication for Mosaic is handled using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and files or formatted data using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This format provides for a mingling of text, graphics, video, sound and hypertext links by "tagging" a text document using HTML. Data encoded using HTML is often referred to as an "HTML document," an "HTML page" or a "home page". These documents and other Internet resources may be accessed across the network by means of a network addressing scheme. These addresses, as used by Mosaic, are referred to as Uniform Resource Locators (URLs).
Since the development in 1993 of Mosaic by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana--Champaign, Ill. (NCSA), numerous other implementations of the Internet browser have been developed including but not limited to Netscape, Cello and Lynx. These applications are generically referred to as Multimedia Internet Browsers (MIBs) in this writing. Although this writing may refer specifically to Mosaic by name, this shall not limit the scope of the invention but serves merely as an example of the class of MIBs in general.
The present inventor noticed that URLs are being referenced with increasing frequency in electronic mail messages. However, a URL in a typical mail message provides the user with no easy way to review the information stored at the URL address. To see the information, the reader of the electronic mail message needs to type the URL into a separate MIB browsing program to access the information. The present inventor has noticed that Mosaic, and all of the known MIB implementations suffer from a serious common deficiency. As "passive" browsers of data, they access or "pull" data from the Internet by use of various network addressing schemes. They do not allow for the active sending of network addresses (and corresponding hypermedia documents) to the users of MIBs. That is, they do not "push" data that is on the Internet to users, nor do the browsers as currently conceived and implemented allow for the receiving of such pushed data.
On the other hand, some electronic mailers do handle multimedia, but none of the known implementations merge the send/receive paradigm with a Mosaic-like browser tool. Furthermore, with a single limited exception no known implementations allow for the simple mailing of an address or location reference on the Internet in a manner that allows quick and easy access to the original documents situated at the sender's site (or other sites). It is to be emphasized that each of these deficiencies were ascertained by the present inventor and the determination of these deficiencies constituted part of the inventive process. The single exception, which appeared commercially after the inventor's initial work on the invention, is the sending and receiving of newsgroup messages via a news server, including a rudimentary parsing of a URL in newsgroup messages received via Netscape, a product of Netscape Communications Corp.
Internet Related Publications
The present invention builds on previously existing Internet ideas such as multimedia browsers, the manner in which electronic mail is handled on the Internet, the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and the manner in which Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) work. A significant amount of material describing these features of the Internet is available both through various sites on the Internet and through published resources. A list of resources explaining various features on which the present invention builds is set forth below. Each of the below publications is incorporated herein by reference.
The Mosaic Handbook, from O'Reilly. Information also available at URL http://gnn.com/ora/. PA1 The World Wide Web Unleashed, from Sam's Publishing, by John December and Neil Randall. PA1 Spinning the Web: How to Provide Information on the Internet, from Van Nostrand Reinhold, by Andrew Ford. PA1 Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week, from Sam's Publishing by Laura Lemay. PA1 The HTML Manual of Style, from Ziff-Davis Press, by Larry Aronson. PA1 rfc 1521 DS, by N. Borenstein, and N. Freed, entitled "MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part One: Mechanisms for specifying and describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies", Sep. 23, 1993. PA1 rfc 1522 DS, by K. Moor, entitled "MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part Two: Message Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text, Sep. 23, 1993. PA1 rfc 1523 I, by N. Borenstein, "The Text/Enriched MIME Content-type", Sep. 23, 1993. PA1 rfc 1524 I, by N. Borenstein, "A User Agent Configuration Mechanism For Multimedia Mail Format Information", September 1993. PA1 rfc 1725, by J. Myers, M. Rose, "Post Office Protocol--Version 3", November 1994.
RFCs are "requests for comments" on various features of the Internet. These requests for comments are draft standards setting forth various information and protocols used on the Internet. The following RFCs are relevant to the present invention and incorporated herein by reference.
At the time of this writing, information on these and other rfcs pertaining to the Internet was available through a World Wide Web Browser at http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/htpin/rfc-index.html. Further, other online information explaining the operation of the Internet is accessible at numerous sites via the Internet, and such information can also be viewed by selecting the desired item from a menu in the browser program "Netscape."